One accusation that I sometimes hear levelled at the truly incredible Boards Of Canada is that they've found a 'sound', and just ground out three albums' worth of songs that are all slight variations on a theme. There is probably an element of truthiness in this, but frankly, fans of BoC don't care. They just want MORE, because even assuming that BoC are a one-trick pony, it's such a wonderful trick, complaining just sounds silly.

But what would BoC sound like, if, you know, they shuffled things up a bit? Well, maybe somewhere close to Today's New Band, 747Music. Hailing from Ontario, 747Music is a self-confessed BoC nut, as an initial listen to his music will confirm. The love of softly and harshly deformed analogue-y sounds are all there as well as the samples of voices, and the tasty beats. But his work is no mere copying exercise - Untitled is a rolling, crunchy electric behemoth and Electric Epiphony is 10 times harder and faster than anything BoC have ever done, punching forward until it falls to bits. The songs are short, lilting and worm their way into your mind, and in some ways, they're mini-epics - a series of mental day trips, if you will. Worth a listen, without doubt - so do so here!

Today's Glib Comparison: Well, yes. Boards Of Canada having sex with The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Whilst, inevitably, The Pixies watch, silently.

Labels: bleeps, Glib comparisons week, satisfyingly short

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Just as the Emo scene attracts people who like to wear black, cut outrageously stupid fringes and look identical to one another, and the Nu-Rave scene attracts 15 year olds who want a legitimate reason to dance to Scooter, the Chiptune set attracts people who are A) Nerds and B) Musicians. This is an unusual combo - mathematically-minded musicians are hard to come by - you don't hear Thom Yorke yapping about logarithms. Actually, that's probably a bad example, but you get my point. Nevertheless, the Chiptune scene is a monster on the Tubular Interwebs, and we have lavished much praise on it's luminaries such as PixelH8 before.

Much of the enjoyment of chip music can rely heavily on nostalgic memories of late 80's video games, though occasionally people like PixelH8 transcend those boundaries. However, just because Today's New Band, MISTER BEEP, produces music which sounds like it really could be from an 80's ZX Sinclair Spectrum game (because it has, kind of), doesn't mean the music is like listening to someone on the bus play all of their polyphonic ringtones to their 'bezzie mate'.

MISTER BEEP's music sounds great, at least to my ears - the ears of someone who spent much of their youth trying to complete Switchblade and Fantasy Island Dizzy on their ZX Speccy. Like how Orbital produce music that sounds like the soundtrack to a film never produced, MISTER BEEP's sounds like the tune that would have accompanied Chase HQ 3, had it ever been made. Those of you who used to revel in the excitement of spending 10 minutes waiting for the screeching loading noise for Operation Wolf to finish will find Who's That Robot and Escape From 16-Bit Land leaving them joyously happy. Perhaps that's the point of the chiptune: nostalgia through new (old) music. Pleasure through rubber keyboards. Mmm, sexy.

Listen to his ZX-tastic tunes here!

Labels: bleeps, nostalgia, ZX 48K Spectrum

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What would the sound of sleep be like? Silence? A deeeep humming noise? Your parents' voices chanting "blood....blood...blood" over and over again? Something similar to the noise when you load a game into a ZX Spectrum? We may never know.

Or perhaps we will - because Today's New Band, oMMM, produces songs that are apparently "spaced out bedcore...a bedtime pop experiment!" Don't let that fool you, though - this music isn’t like Side Two of The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. Instead, oMMM is a musical trip, a treat of inventive bleeping and what could be hesitantly described as 'soundscapes'. In songs like CATWALKTVKAYAKARMX, the sound drifts - but not aimlessly. oMMM are taking us on a bit of a journey - but a nice one, with a break for a cream tea somewhere along the line.

SZWOMMMRMX could be described as residing somewhere between Boards of Canada, the ubiquitous Aphex Twin and Four Tet if we were being particularly lazy. Which we are. It's a particularly lovely, deliberately dream-like skittle through spacey sounds.

oMMM's music is calming yet attention-grabbing, a brilliant musical representation of the relaxation and insanity that both tumble from sleep. The music is good for your ears, and the calmness good for your mind. Listen NOW at oMMM's Myspace page!

And if you found that all a bit too serious, here's the best/most ridiculous song about a £1.50 portion of chicken and chips performed in a grime style ever. Thanks to Scatman Jamie for pointing out the brilliance of 'Junior Spesh'

***BLOGGER'S BROKEN AGAIN - NO IMAGES TODAY***

Labels: bleeps, sleepy, ZX 48K Spectrum

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Oh, bugger it. We had the hat-trick of dinosaur-themed bands the other week, and it should be clear to you regular readers by now that we love gimmicks just about above anything else here at A New Band A Day. So, after yesterday's super Glaswegian Scrabble-fiends* Q Without U, we're going for broke and pumping two more Glasgow bands at you, today and tomorrow. Glasgow, similarly to issues we've expounded limply about Wales before, must have something special in the water (no jokes about Tennants Super, please) as the city is churning out superb bands left, right and centre at the moment.

So, Today's New Gimmickly-Induced Band is ERRORS. If I was mildly cretinous, I'd make a poor joke about how there is nothing erroneous about their music, because it's fantastic. Unfortunately, I am that cretinous - there is nothing erroneous about their music - they sound exciting, inventive and are so pleasingly non-Razorlight/Kooks/etc that I almost did a backflip listening to them. To be slightly glib, they sound a bit like A.N.B.A.D. favourite PixelH8 coupled with the gloriously noisy Battles. You honestly have to hear Salut France, a song with all the skippy beats, gorgeous melodies and bleepy poking you'll ever need. Focussed and sharp, but without falling into that awful laptop featurlessness like most electro-noise bands.

You could dance to them, you could strut around town to them, and if you were pretentious, you could stroke your chin to them. Whatever you do, just listen, because they're SUPER.

Listen to them, quick! Myspace here. More Glaswegian bands tomorrow!

*possibly true

Labels: actual brilliance, bleeps, glasgow

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Mmm, camping. My last experience in a tent was at Glastonbury 2007 , and while I wasn't shivering, soaking wet under a tree, scooping wet food into my mouth trying to keep warm whilst listening indifferently to the music being played, I was vomiting into black bin bags in my tent, having hilariously contracted sickness and diarrhea. Not great times, but memorable at least.

So to make New York's Tent today's New Band Of The Day was a minor, slightly pathetic, personal triumph of eschewing awful canvas-related memories from my mind. Still, it was worth it, because Tent make some great music. Stop and Go is alternately dense and sparse, with thin drifting vocals - and Tight Squeeze is similar, basic and minimal but coupled with a dreamy vocal melody.

In some ways Tent are like a groovier version of Kings of Convenience, but without any of the blandness that that may imply. Their music is a tightly contorting glide, slightly spaced-out and wide-eyed. I'd be tempted to describe it as techno-folk if that didn't sound like the worst genre of music of all time. Perhaps the best thing to do is to listen to it for yourself at their MySpace page.

Labels: bleeps, camping, slightly mournful

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Regular readers of A New Band A Day will know that there few criteria to being selected to feature. Firstly, great tunes are a must, obviously. Actually - that's the extent of the criteria. The only additional 'rule' is that a terrific, hopefully comic name, preferably pun-laden, will pretty much seal the deal. It certainly worked for previous New Band, the LOL-tastic Ice, Sea, Dead People.

Introducing, then, today's new band, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.This is probably a good point to mention that T.E.E.D. aren't just a band with a novelty name - they're not Kajagoogoo, you know. Instead, they're a band with a great name and a great bunch of bleep-tunes on their MySpace page. Listen to them here, and try listening to Dinosaurs Having a Party without picturing the stumpy-armed scaly guys bopping around a swamp to the clunky Bontempi-keyboard noises.

In fact, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs are all about having a whale (or should that be "a Basilosaurus"?) of a time. Let Me Tell You is an even better track, punching an insistent, droning shudder of a blee-ee-ee-ee-eep along to a banger of a beat. This song is worthy of being played repeatedly at anyone's house party, dinosaur-related fancy-dress themes or not. Get Carnivorous!

Labels: animal themed, bleeps, dinosaurs

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Making music's easy isn't it? Anyone can play guitar - Radiohead told us that, and if all the combined intellectualism of Radiohead says so, well, it must be true. Actually, look at it this way: Pete Docherty can play the guitar and after being arrested for the 19 billionth time for drug possession, questions must now start to be asked of his supposed intelligence.

So, if making tunes is a piece of cake, why would anyone want to shun the simple methods and choose to cobble together music by painstakingly wiring bits of old Gameboys, NES consoles and Commodore 64 computers together? That is a question which may never be answered, but if the end result is anywhere near as brilliant as today's new band PixelH8's music, maybe the 48K Spectrum should be the instrument of choice for truculent teenagers everywhere.

PixelH8 may or may not be a minor genius. All the sounds on his songs are made from the sounds off old consoles and computers, and must take most of his time, or sanity, to make work as well as they do. Super Fantastic Turbo Magical is the soundtrack to the best videogame you never played, but then any of the great songs on his Myspace page http://www.myspace.com/pixelh8 could be.

Somehow PixelH8 takes the noises you'll half-remember from your wasted videogame-playing youth and makes songs that are actually beautiful. For this, he truly deserves to be one of the chosen few who know the infinite lives POKE for Bubble Bobble on the ZX 48K Spectrum*. He definitely deserves a listen, at least. Let me know what you think!

*it's POKE: 43871 52

Labels: bleeps, patience of a saint, ZX 48K Spectrum

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